The spreadsheets are bleeding again. I spent the morning staring at the numbers, and the numbers stared back, cold and indifferent as a lizard on a rock. We’re nearly at the end of 2025, a year that was supposed to be the glittering future, the apex of human ingenuity. Instead, it’s just another year where the suits in the glass towers decided that the most efficient way to save a buck is to throw a human being into the furnace.
They call it a “correction.” They call it “streamlining.” They use soft, sanitized words to describe the act of taking away a man’s rent money and his ability to buy a decent bottle of scotch. I’ve been reading through the casualty lists—a comprehensive tracker of who got the axe this year—and let me tell you, it reads less like a business report and more like an obituary for the middle class.
The headline says the layoff wave is “still kicking.” Kicking? It’s stomping. It’s wearing steel-toed boots and dancing on the necks of the people who actually built the code these companies run on. Last year it was 150,000 jobs. This year? We’re racking up bodies by the thousands every month. February alone saw over 16,000 people told to pack their cardboard boxes and hit the pavement. Happy Valentine’s Day, here’s your severance package, don’t let the biometric scanner hit you on the way out.
I need a drink just thinking about it.
The real kicker, the joke that isn’t funny at all, is the reason behind it. It’s the two letters that have become the four horsemen of the employment apocalypse: AI.
Look at HP. They’re cutting up to 6,000 jobs by 2028. Why? To “leverage AI to speed up product development.” That’s the corporate speak. Translation: We figured out how to make a machine do your job poorly but cheaply, so you can go starve in the alley. They want to boost efficiency. Efficiency is the god they pray to. It’s a cruel god. It demands sacrifice, and the sacrifice is always the guy in the cubicle who just bought a house because he thought his job at a “legacy tech giant” was safe.
Nothing is safe. That’s the lesson of 2025.
You look at the list, and it’s a bloodbath of irony. Take xAI—Elon’s little playground. They laid off a third of their data annotation team. These are the poor bastards who taught the AI how to think, how to speak, how to not be a total psychopath. And once the machine learned enough? Zap. You’re gone. You trained your replacement, and now your replacement is cheaper than you. It’s cannibalism. The snake isn’t just eating its tail; it’s eating the guy who feeds it mice.
And it’s not just the worker bees. It’s the dreamers, too. The startups. The “disruptors.” Cruise—the self-driving car folks—laid off half their workforce. They were supposed to revolutionize transport. Instead, they just revolutionized how fast you can lose your livelihood. The CEO gets the boot, the execs get the boot, and the engineers who spent years trying to teach a car not to run over traffic cones are left wondering if Uber is hiring human drivers anymore.
The sheer scale of it makes you want to laugh until you cough up something vital. Intel. Look at Intel. They announced they were cutting 21,000 people. Twenty-one thousand. That’s not a layoff; that’s a small city. That’s a sold-out arena of people, all getting the same email telling them that the company “needs to be leaner.” Leaner? They’re stripping the meat off the bone until there’s nothing left but a skeleton rattling in the wind.
It puts a sour taste in my mouth, worse than cheap gin.
We have this tracker, this list of misery, updated regularly so we can watch the “trajectory of cutbacks.” It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion, except the car is the economy and the passengers are us. They tell us this is necessary for “innovation.” That’s the word they love. Innovation.
What are we innovating, exactly? We’re innovating a world where a handful of billionaires own the algorithms, and the rest of us are fighting over gig work delivering lukewarm burritos to the few people left who can afford them. And even the burrito delivery guys aren’t safe—Just Eat is cutting 450 jobs because they’re “increasingly using automation.” The robot brings the food, and the human starves. Perfection.
You see names on this list that used to mean something. Apple. Microsoft. Amazon. The titans. They aren’t struggling. They have more money than God, and certainly more than the devil. Yet, Amazon cuts 14,000 corporate roles. Microsoft cuts thousands while pouring billions into AI data centers. It’s a transfer of wealth, pure and simple, from the people who do the work to the machines that mimic the work, and the shareholders who own the machines.
And the way they do it—it’s cowardly. Atlassian’s CEO sent a pre-recorded message to cut 150 roles. A recording. He couldn’t even look them in the digital eye live. Then his co-founder goes on stage and tells everyone to “embrace the AI revolution.” Embracing the revolution feels a lot like hugging a cactus when you’re the one being revolutionized out of a paycheck.
There’s a section in the news about the “Disrupt 2026 Waitlist.” They want you to sign up to be first in line to buy tickets to see the “industry leaders.” The same leaders who just fired 22,000 people this year. They want you to pay to hear them talk about “growth” and “sharpening your edge.” The only edge they’re sharpening is the one on the guillotine.
It’s all so absurd. You have companies like Canva, the darling of design, firing technical writers nine months after telling everyone to use generative AI. They train the staff to use the tools, the tools get better, the staff gets fired. It’s a perfect circle of exploitation.
The human cost? It’s incalculable. It’s not just the lost wages. It’s the loss of purpose. We define ourselves by what we do. “I’m a coder.” “I’m a writer.” “I’m a project manager.” When the algorithm takes that away, what are you? You’re just another unit of biological waste in a world that prefers silicon.
I saw a note about a company called MyBambu closing down. Laying off everyone. 141 people. Just gone. Poof. Or Zeen, a social platform, shutting down. Failed to build a user base. In the old days, you failed because you made a bad product. Now, you fail because you didn’t pivot to AI fast enough, or you pivoted too fast and tripped over your own shoelaces.
The tech industry loves to talk about “failures” as learning experiences. “Fail fast,” they say. But the CEO who fails fast gets a golden parachute and a speaking gig at TechCrunch Disrupt. The employee who fails fast because his department was “restructured” gets a gap on his resume and a panic attack at 3 AM.
And don’t get me started on the “efficiency” of it all. Paycom laying off 500 people because automation improved “back-office efficiencies.” That’s the sterilized language of a sociopath. Those 500 people had families. They had debts. They had dreams, however small and fragile. Now they are just a percentage point on a quarterly earnings call, a sacrifice made to bump the stock price by fifty cents.
The logic is undeniable to the suits. Why pay a human full benefits, health insurance, and 401k matching when a server farm in the desert can generate the same mediocre output for a fraction of the cost? The human needs sleep. The human gets depressed. The human gets hangovers. The AI just hums and consumes electricity. It’s the perfect employee—soulless, tireless, and completely under control. Until it hallucinates and tells a customer to eat rocks, but hey, that’s just a bug. We’ll fix it in patch 2.0.
So here we are, late in 2025. The air is getting colder, and the job market is absolute ice. If you’re in tech, you’re looking over your shoulder. You’re wondering if that meeting on your calendar with HR is “The Meeting.” You’re wondering if your code is good enough to beat the bot, or if you’re just training your executioner.
They say this tracker serves as a “reminder of the human impact.” But does it? To the people in charge, it’s just data. It’s just noise. They don’t hear the silence in the apartment after the laptop is returned. They don’t feel the knot in the stomach when the rent is due. They live in the clouds—literally, the cloud—and down here on earth, things are getting messy.
I walked past a bar yesterday. It was empty. Even the drowning of sorrows has become too expensive for the modern tech worker. We’re moving toward a world where the only people with job security are the ones repairing the robots, and eventually, the robots will repair themselves. Then what?
Maybe we’ll all become “prompt engineers,” dragging raw text out of the digital ether like miners panning for gold in a sewer. Or maybe we’ll realize that we built a cage, locked ourselves inside, and handed the key to a predictive text model.
The list keeps growing. November isn’t over yet. There’s still time for a few more thousand cuts before the Christmas bonus season starts for the executives. They’ll toast to a “leaner, more agile” 2026. They’ll talk about the brave new world of automation.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will be down here, counting the change in our pockets, wondering if we’re obsolete yet. The answer, my friends, is blinking on a screen somewhere in a server room, and it doesn’t look good.
I’m going to pour another one. The machines can write poetry, they can write code, and they can drive cars into walls, but they can’t drink whiskey and feel the crushing weight of existence. At least,
Source: A comprehensive list of 2025 tech layoffs | TechCrunch